U.S. Rep. Jan Schakowsky, who represented a Far North Side and north and northwest suburban district in Congress for more than two and a half decades, announced on Monday she will not seek a 15th term next year.
“This is the official, that I’m not going to run again for Congress, and there are pluses to that,” Schakowsky said at an Ultimate Women’s Power Luncheon event she hosted at the Sheraton Grand Chicago Hotel. “You know, I can still be a badass.”
The move marks the end of an era for a reliably Democratic district that Schakowsky, 80 of Evanston, has represented since 1999 after soundly defeating two opponents, including JB Pritzker, in an open seat primary. Before her, Sidney Yates held the seat for 24 terms, almost 50 years.
Her retirement will undoubtedly set off a series of political maneuvers, with a progressive political online content creator and newcomer to Illinois having weeks ago announced a bid for the seat and others with more local ties to the district’s political scene now sure to quickly follow.
“While I will miss serving the people of the 9th District in an elected capacity, I am not going anywhere,” Schakowsky said in a release about her retirement. “For the remainder of my term, and beyond, I vow to continue taking every opportunity possible to fight for my community and my country.”
Schakowsky’s announcement comes less than two weeks after U.S. Sen. Dick Durbin, also 80, declared he would not seek another term.
Schakowsky was a state representative when she first ran for Congress on her record as a lawmaker and activist, with a “message of equal rights for women, minorities and gays, protection for union workers, and affordable national health care,” the Tribune wrote.
She was seen as more progressive than her two Democratic primary opponents, state Sen. Howard Carroll and Pritzker, who finished third. The primary was one of the most expensive in the nation at the time, as Pritzker, heir to the Hyatt Hotel fortune, spent nearly $1 million of his own money. In his two bids for governor, Pritzker has spent $350 million.
Declaring victory in 1998, Schakowsky said voters’ desire to have a woman representative may have put her over the edge, as she was elected at a time when all of the state’s then 20 members in the House were men.
“Now the men’s club delegation to the U.S. House of Representatives will have a woman’s voice,” she said.
At the time of her first win, the 9th Congressional District ran along Lake Michigan from Diversey Avenue to Evanston’s north border before moving west to take in some of the city’s Northwest Side, as well as north suburban Skokie, Golf, Morton Grove, Lincolnwood and much of Niles. Today, the district is still heavily Democratic but stretches from the Far North Side of Chicago to include all or part of Buffalo Grove, Tower Lake and Hawthorn Woods as well as other parts of Cook and McHenry Counties.
Even as redistricting changed its borders, Schakowsky has not had a serious primary challenger since she was first elected to Congress and has easily defeated Republican opponents in the general election.
Over the years, she rose to become a member of the House Democratic leadership team under former House Speaker Nancy Pelosi and was an ardent voice of women’s rights and increasing the number of women elected to Congress. She twice backed Marie Newman in challenging incumbent conservative Democrat U.S. Rep. Dan Lipinski, with Newman defeating Lipinski in 2020. Schakowsky has also been a vocal opponent of President Donald Trump, skipping his joint address to Congress this year as she did in 2018.
Throughout her time in Washington, she was an advocate for stricter gun laws, health care reform and the consumer issues that helped buoy her to the national stage. She was an early critic of the Iraq war and a supporter of abortion rights.
Schakowsky, who is Jewish and has been a staunch supporter of Israel, more recently was criticized by some to the left who thought she should more forcefully advocate for Palestinians in the ongoing war in Gaza.
The daughter of Jewish immigrants, Schakowsky grew up in Chicago and was active in public interest groups before running for the state legislature. Her husband, Robert Creamer, was the founder of one of those groups, Illinois Public Action. Creamer, a political consultant, was sentenced to five months in prison in 2006 for using bad checks to prop up his struggling consumer group and for a tax charge.
Even before Schakowsky’s announcement Monday, one person had already declared candidacy for the seat: 26-year-old Kat Abughazaleh, a progressive critic of the far-right who moved to Illinois last year and out-raised Schakowsky in the first quarter of 2025.
Abughazaleh will almost certainly be joined by a field of Democratic hopefuls that could include Evanston Mayor Daniel Biss, state Sen. Laura Fine, state Rep. Hoan Huynh and a handful of others.
Last week, addressing the potential of a primary field shaping up to replace Durbin, Pritzker recalled his run against Schakowsky and encouraged new leadership in the Senate race.
“Remember, I ran for Congress when I was 31 years old, and there were an awful lot of people who said to me that it’s not your turn. I ran anyway. I think that in fact we need more young people, we need the new generation,” he said.
Schakowsky herself once represented a generational change, as she took over her seat from someone who held it for nearly 50 years As she announced she would become the first declared candidate for Yates’ post in April 1997, Schakowsky traced her career to one of her first and most famous political fights: getting a freshness dates on groceries.
“A date on cottage cheese did not change the world, but it’s changed my life forever,” she said. “It convinced me that a few committed individuals could make their world better.”
